MAMA WEED: A Crime Caper With Some Questionable Choices

The latest film by director Jean-Paul Salomé (Arsène Lupin) goes by many names. The Hannelore Cayre novel upon which it is based is called La Daronne, a French slang term for mother. In some markets, the film is called The Godmother, which actually makes a great deal of sense. However, in the United States—perhaps to avoid confusion with a Jennifer Lopez vehicle called The Godmother currently in development—someone decided to dub the film the giggle-inducing Mama Weed.

Starring the iconic Isabelle Huppert as the titular translator-turned-queenpin, Mama Weed is a tension-filled dark comedy that explores the lengths some will go in order to survive and thrive in a world that doesn’t seem to care. Some keen points are made along the way about the way migrants are treated in French society, though the casting of Huppert—as marvelous as she always is—as a person of Algerian descent does raise one’s eyebrows.

Working to Live

Patience Portefeux (Huppert) is a French-Arabic translator running phone surveillance for the Paris police department’s narcotics unit; her boyfriend, Philippe (Hippolyte Girardot) helped her get the gig, complete with long hours and low pay. Despite the work, Patience is behind on her rent and running out of money to keep her elderly mother (Liliane Rovère), suffering from dementia, in her long-term care home. It doesn’t help that she only just paid off the debts she was saddled with as a young widow when her husband abruptly dropped dead of a heart attack.

While Patience’s adult daughters dismiss their deceased father as a lying crook, Patience has fond memories of the globe-trotting lifestyle they led while her husband was alive. In addition, she recalls that her father had no choice but to turn to crime in order to survive when he first immigrated to France from Algeria. So, despite her current role working with the police, Patience isn’t terribly bothered by those who break the law—if anything, she sympathizes with them.

When Patience discovers that one of her mother’s nurses, Kadidja (Farida Ouchani), is the mother of someone she is surveilling, she warns Kadidja that the police are lying in wait to arrest her son as he transports a truckload of hash into the country. (That’s right, Mama Weed isn’t even about weed.) The son dumps the hash, and Patience decides to take the disposal of the drugs into her own hands. Masquerading as a glamorous Moroccan woman, she uses the knowledge and contacts she’s acquired from her surveillance work to make a fortune moving the hash, going from low-key workaholic to confident mogul practically overnight. (One could suggest How Patience Got Her Groove Back as yet another alternative title for the film.) But as “La Daronne” grows in notoriety, Philippe gets more obsessed with catching her—and even with Patience’s insider knowledge of the investigation, keeping a step ahead of him is a challenge.

Breaking Bad

There is a moment in Mama Weed when Patience first goes to meet her dealer contacts, two goofballs dubbed Scotch and Cocoa Puff that she has been surveilling for some time. The two men are anxiously waiting as she dramatically emerges from a car to the tune of some bombastic hip-hop music, clad in hijab and oversized sunglasses, with her newly adopted drug-sniffing dog strutting at her side. Scotch and Cocoa Puff’s eyes widen in shock; clearly, they weren’t expecting that the person reaching out to them to move an epic amount of extremely high-quality hash would be a beautiful older woman.

The scene is hilarious, from the music cue to the various actors’ performances, but it’s also the kind of thing that can’t help but make one feel uncomfortable in our current moment. Yes, Huppert’s character is supposed to be of North African descent, but Huppert is not, and watching her essentially cosplay as someone of migrant background is the kind of thing that might have slipped by without comment in the 1980s or 1990s, but definitely not today (and especially not when the equally talented and glamorous Isabelle Adjani also exists). Watching Patience shop online for hijabs as part of a costume when so many women in France are still persecuted for wearing them as part of their religious observance feels icky in a way that cannot be ignored.

That being said, Huppert has a good time in the role, and many will get just as much a kick out of watching her rapping (awfully) in her car or using violent video games to covertly communicate with her dealers (one of several real-world touches in the film’s script) as she seems to have done while making Mama Weed. The scenes between her and Scotch, played with supreme doofus comic timing by Rachid Guellaz, are some of the funniest in the film, her exasperation with him matched by his confusion at this strange woman’s expert knowledge of his field. A subplot involving Patience’s growing camaraderie with her landlady, Colette Fo (Jade-Nadja Nguyen), who is not only a Chinese community leader but also an underworld doyenne, is quite enjoyable; it’s not every European crime film that gives you two intelligent women of a certain age running the show.

In the world of Mama Weed, nearly everyone in Paris of an immigrant background is engaged in some kind of illegal activity on the side, the film’s argument being that French society makes it hard for them to make a living any other way. The more time Patience spends living and working among these people, from small fry like Scotch to powerful bosses like Colette, the more she begins to argue with Philippe about his investigations, dismissing what he does for a living as cruel and unfair (even if her own job is technically to help him do it). The script by Salomé and Cayre actually makes a solid argument for defunding the police in favor of community safety measures. After all, as Colette notes, and Patience witnesses firsthand, in the Chinese community, there’s no point in calling the police anyway; they can take care of things themselves.

Conclusion

Watching Huppert opine of the worthlessness of police is worth the price of admission; watching her smoothly dance around Philippe’s simmering suspicions that she may know more about La Doyenne than she’s letting on is just the icing on the tasty edible that is Mama Weed. But the unpleasant aftertaste of watching a white Frenchwoman masquerade as a minority is unavoidable. In the end, Mama Weed is exactly what you think a film called Mama Weed would be: funny, frenetic, and a bit problematic.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Isabelle Huppert? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mama Weed opens in theaters in the U.S. on July 16, 2021 and will be released digitally on July 23, 2021. You can find more international release dates here.

Watch Mama Weed